Mini Soccer Balls in Space

The structures of soccer balls and buckyballs both contain 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons (the pentagons are black on soccer balls). The pentagons are needed to make the spherical shapes -- they allow the grids of hexagons to bend at just the right points. Soccer balls have 60 intersecting points at the same places where buckyballs have 60 carbon atoms.

The Spitzer Space Telescope is a NASA mission managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This website is maintained by the Spitzer Science Center, located on the campus of the California Institute of Technology and part of NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center.